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Effect of thoracic muscle on dynamic performance of flexible flapping wings of insects

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Abstract

The thorax is the central component of the insect flight drivetrain, making it essential to understand how thoracic muscles influence insect flight for flapping wing microair vehicle design. This paper presents a theoretical model that takes into account the influence of thoracic muscles on flapping wing motion with reference to real insects. The thoracic muscle effect is simulated by the chordwise torsional spring, whose stiffness is derived from a comparison test with the results of real insect experiments. The elastic deformation of the flexible flapping wing is modeled by the von Kármán nonlinear plate theory. The predictive quasi-steady aerodynamic model based on the blade element theory can estimate the aerodynamic force, and the modeling of the spanwise bending and twisting is done with quadratic polynomials. The equations of motion are solved using the Newmark-Raphson method. Results suggest that including the influence of thoracic muscles decreases cycle-averaged lift and power, but enhances the efficiency of lift production by 23%. Moreover, it also postpones pitching motion and reduces its amplitude, though the movement trends of the flapping motion remain approximately unchanged regardless of the inclusion of the thoracic muscle effect.

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Acknowledgements

This project is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 12272088 and 11922205).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Structural Dynamics of Liaoning Province, College of Sciences, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110819, China

    Feng Liu Yang & Yan Qing Wang

  2. Key Laboratory of Ministry of Education On Safe Mining of Deep Metal Mines, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110819, China

    Yan Qing Wang

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FLY helped in methodology, data curation, formal analysis, writing—original draft, visualization, investigation, software, validation. YQW contributed to supervision, conceptualization, funding acquisition, project administration, writing—review and editing, resources.

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Correspondence to Yan Qing Wang.

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Yang, F.L., Wang, Y.Q. Effect of thoracic muscle on dynamic performance of flexible flapping wings of insects. Acta Mech 235, 597–613 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00707-023-03757-2

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